Paper Towns was designed for children that need to be protected from simple realities, human unfriendliness and over dramatic trigger warnings.

Paper Towns was designed for people who could only accept the notion of suicide if it was presented as something that would never happen to them, a thing that only occurs to middle-aged men going through their mid-life crisis; if you’re pretty, young and popular there’s no way you could fall victim to something as ugly and unglamorous as depression.

People argu that this film was produced to dismantle the notion of “manic pixie dream girl.” I feel like all this has done is reinforce this unrealistic idyllic representation of what young teenage girls “should be”. Margo Roth Spiegelman starts off as a cool, popular beauty who parties with jocks (referred to by Quentin as a “miracle”) into an even more elusive, fantasy-like, euphoric being, with her disappearances creating an even larger air of mystery that leaves us easily imagining Quentin, pining for her long after her sudden exit.

The film is overloaded with extremely cliched character quirks, what with Margo’s fissiparous like for conventional captilization making it a classic example of trying too hard to be unique, which in itself is making you “unique, just like everyone else”. With the addition of Radar’s never-ending collection of black Santas and and Ben’s addiction to calling grown women “honeybunnies”. It’s a neatly packaged film on solid, middle class middle ground, with the rough edges rubbed out. Quentin conveniently has a black best friend to present the “total diversity” and nothing controversial is ever said with the small fight between Quentin and his friends being resolved within moments.

This film never succeeds in becoming a ‘real’ teenage love story because it acted out by a bunch of squeaky clean teenagers turning the whole thing borderline mundane.

When I was little, I wanted to be white.
That’s the colour the sweet, popular girl at school was. That’s the colour the beautiful, breath-taking supermodels on the billboards. And that was the colour all the characters in my favourite tv series were. Which role models looked like me? Beyoncé is now the third woman (behind Naomi Campbell & Halle Berry) to grace the cover of Vogue in the magazine’s 123 years of publication, and people are raving as if this is iconic. That’s not iconic. That’s ridiculous. The third in 123 years. But you say there is equality.
My mother moved from France to England because she didn’t believe she, a young black woman, could get a respectable teaching job where we were. My mum forced me to read English story books, meant for an age much younger than I was yet it was still extremely difficult. She made me read every single day and I hated every minute of it. I see know that she did this so I could speak English perfectly by the time it mattered, by the time people started to assume I was illiterate, uneducated and ignorant from the colour of my skin. And even though my mum spent hours teaching me the English I am able to speak so fluently now, due to her patience and encouragement, you can still tell English is her second language. She asks me how to say certain British expressions to fit in, She asks me to proofread emails for her, out of embarrassment that she feels her English isn’t sufficient enough to be taken seriously, it sickens me that while their mastery of the English language is more than proficient, it doesn’t matter, because the rest of the world doesn’t care. But you say there is equality.

I grew up, watching the world’s understanding of my cultural heritage being reduced to the “black best friend”, being portrayed as domestic help, sassy and thugs. I grew up being asked “but, where are you really from?” as a reply to when I told them I was born in France. I grew up, being told I had to be the servant when I played families with my white friends, when I held in me the fact that when slavery was finally abolished, slaves received no apology and the slave-owners often received a minimum of £50 per slave in compensation. The slave-owners received paid compensation. But you say there is equality.
I live in a country that when a well-known television presenter says the racist n-slur, on air, he keeps his job .I live in the 21st century, where the only understanding I can get about the story behind my heritage comes from my own parents, where the only times I can see people who look like me on screen and aren’t portrayed in a degrading, racially comic, stereotypical way is on YouTube. The caricatures on television teaches us that we are brash, aggressive deficient at English and poor. But you say there is equality.
Who would want to black? In the few instances coloured people made an appearance on my television, they were always the criminals, the delinquents, the poor or had a funny accent everyone could laugh at. Obviously no way someone who wasn’t white could be educated, wealthy or even just a generally good person.

“The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can’t anymore. I don’t know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.”

I thought I’d start with the quote this time so that no one would have to go through my crappy writing to attain the pure genius of Gillian Flynn.

Anyway, as I read this quote for the first time (how ironic) it struck me as a lot closer to the truth than I’d like it to be.

I’m quite embarrassed to say that once, when someone told me their father was dead, my response was “How did they die?”

No condolences, no apologies, already my brain was trying to turn this unfortunate event into a morbid, murder-mystery.

I will admit that anecdote didn’t have much to do with the quote but I just thought I’d share some of my embarrassing life with you.